8.28.2013

Industry Shifts. You Should Too.

Thoughts on Digital Self-Publishing (DSP), Series Three

As Jenny the Bloggess recently
pointed out, there are no "rules" for successful digital
self-publishing. Many industries have a proverbial mailroom, a place
where you "do your time" while learning the ropes and making
connections, providing ambitious/determined/persistent/tenacious
individuals a path to the job they actually want. Most professional
creative arts don't have anything as concrete as an actual mailroom –
typically, your career begins with some manner of audition, upon
which the industry either accepts you or it doesn't, and if it
doesn't you have to decide whether to try again – but there have
always been ways for new artists to boost their chances of breaking
in. Musicians can move to Nashville and play coffeeshops. Stage
actors can garner credits by working their way up through community
theaters and small companies. Artists can gain exposure through
local galleries and art shows.

Writers' "mailroom" used to be
periodicals. Once upon a time, you could intern with a print
publication or freelance with several, work your way up to having your own regular column (a
paying gig!), build readership and reputation, then capitalize on
that experience and position to make the leap to part-time or
full-time book author.

That wasn't the only route to writing
success, of course, but it worked for centuries, from Charles Dickens
to Neil Gaiman.

But with the recent decline of print
periodicals, the path from "starving writer" to "successful
author" has gotten a whole lot less clear. Free-to-read web-based
publishing has gobbled up our trail of breadcrumbs.

(True, it also creates opportunity; but if something is broad it is assumed to be shallow, and often deservedly so. All-access web publishing means that everyone can be a blogger, anyone can start an online periodical, anybody can get thousands of hits per month. All you need is sensationalism, a clever URL and SEO tweaks, and some possibly-off-topic viral marketing. The fact that this opportunity exists undermines the credentials and credibility of legitimate web writers.)

It won't always be this way. Right now,
writers are operating during a brief window where technological
changes are shaking up established industries. The big players are
slow to change, but they also have a lot of capital and clout. Although its not optimal, they can afford to take their time
adjusting. Here's what I'm expecting:

Periodicals will make a digital
resurgence, severely limiting access to free web-based content in
favor of paid subscriptions managed through ereaders. New periodicals
will have lower subscription and production costs, fewer employees,
and decentralized (cloud-based) virtual offices. I've been
anticipating this for a few years, and it's only recently started to
happen.

The decline of brick-and-mortar bookstore chains, far from heralding the end of physical bookstores - as champions of the ebook revolution like Smashwords founder Mark Coker continue to imply - will actually re-open market space for smaller, privately owned, mom-and-pop bookstores.

Of course the big players like Borders have a hard time competing with online booksellers. Giant retailers are able to take over from local shops because their size allows them to conduct business more efficiently and less expensively, so they can undercut local shops' prices and steal their customers. Online retailing takes efficiency to a whole new level: it's far easier and more cost-effective to maintain a single virtual storefront than thousands of physical storefronts. It's the difference between running a single store that a billion customers can access, and running a thousand stores that reach a thousand customers per store.

But people will always want real books, and physical bookstores are good for readers, authors, and publishers alike. They allow for "accidental discovery" and socializing with other, local, real readers, in ways that social media will never be able to provide. I think that as Walden, Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million stores gradually slip away, smaller, more interesting, more agile bookshops founded by smarter, more interesting booksellers will begin to pop up in neighborhoods and shopping centers.

These new bookstores will be organized around interest and connection. New bookshops will be organized around genres, book clubs, particular literary movements and writers' groups, award-winning titles. Or they'll be organized around activities other than reading, but that go very well with reading - the new bookshops will look like coffeeshops, tea emporiums, pubs, cafes, curiosity shops, board game parlors, used book exchanges, gardening shops, christmas shops. They'll be the kind of place where you sit and stay awhile, or where your hobbyists' group or book club meets on midweek evenings.

Meanwhile the new bookseller, or shop owner, will likely have a small enough inventory to manage that he or she will have read each book the shop stocks, so customers will be able to trust that any book they risk buying will be worth the read. Or maybe, after a few visits the girl behind the register will know what drink to get ready as soon as you push the door open, and when you talk about what's going on this week you'll each have a book to recommend to the other.

I, for one, am happy to see the corporate booksellers, always chasing efficiency, move online and out of our neighborhoods. Once they do, it won't be long before I can walk down to the little shop on the corner, order a coffee, and be told which of the new titles that came in this week I ought to read next.

DSP will become the de facto
vetting process for traditional publication. Here's my reasoning:

For years, the traditional-publishing
acquisitions process has been fundamentally broken, just waiting for some new method to come along and replace it. Acquisition
editors receive so much correspondence and have so many projects to
wade through, they're choking. There simply aren't enough hours in a
week to give pitches sufficient attention. Editors work ten hours a day
at the office five and six days a week, then spend hours more each evening
reading manuscripts. Inevitably, great books get rejected because
their authors haven't written a sufficiently compelling query – and
lots and lots of crap books get published because an author wrote a
great pitch, but has only written a mediocre story, and the
publisher can't afford (because of time constraints or cost-benefit
analysis) to give the mediocre book the developmental attention it
needs to become a good book.

How many times have you been in a
bookstore and thought, “how on earth did this get
published??” or “I'm not at all surprised to see that one
in the Bargain Books section.” (And then followed it up with, “if
this guy made it, how come I haven't?” or “hey, if this got
published, mine certainly has a shot”?)

This situation is pretty bad for
traditional publishers, authors, and retailers alike. As Mark Coker
explains in Smashwords' Secrets
to Ebook Publishing Success, print-book retailing is based on a
consignment-style business model. Physical bookstores only have so
much floor space, so they generally only stock new, unproven titles
for a few weeks before sending unsold copies back to the publisher
for a full refund. A good book only has a few weeks to capture reader
attention (and investment); a bad book is just stealing precious
visibility from a better title.

You would think that, given how
difficult it is to break into traditional publishing, publishers
would at least be able to guarantee the quality of their products.
But they can't. There are so many wannabe writers clamoring for
attention, on top of all the usual demands of business, that it
simply hasn't been possible.

And that's where DSP comes in.

Traditional publishers are already
starting to wake up – already starting to comb the top-100 lists of
DSP books for new authors to offer print deals to. If a DSP book is
doing well, acquisitions editors already know that fronting the cash
to market and print thousands of copies is a sound financial
investment. Before DSP, they had to guess. And they were pretty good
at guessing – good enough to be profitable, anyway – but it was
still guessing. A successful DSP title removes the guesswork.

All that's a bit of digression, though.
Say you do become successful as a DSP author. At that point, you may
not be interested in traditional publishing (even if traditional
publishers are interested in you).

Regardless, one reality that DSP hasn't
changed for writers is the need to dodge slush piles. In case you're
not familiar with the term: in traditional publishing, a slush pile is the name for the bottomless stack of sub-par query letters and
manuscript proposals that whole sections of acquisition editors'
offices are buried under. You get tossed into a slush pile, man, you
may as well have fallen into a black hole. There's no coming back
from that. (Not with that project + editor combination, anyway.)

In DSP, the slush piles aren't gone –
they've just moved.
Tactics for avoiding them – also known as the best practices for
marketing your book – have shifted as well.

As I said before, there aren't rules
for DSP. What worked for one author with a particular title or body
of work at a certain time with a given venue isn't necessarily going
to work for you / your book, even if all the other conditions are
essentially identical.

But there are trends, principles, for
how internet-based creative business works. I'm going to tell you
what they are, explain why they operate the way they do, and make
suggestions about how to harness those ideas on behalf of your own
writing. Stay Tuned – that's what's up next.